January's Not So Bad...

by Joyce

As I sit and write this, it's snowing like crazy outside. It's damn cold. The high in Pittsburgh on Friday is supposed to about eight degrees.

But I'm going to look on the bright side and try and come up with some reasons why January isn't so bad. (Notice I said try to come with reasons.)

January is the first full month of winter. If it wasn't for cold winters, we wouldn't appreciate the summer so much. Think about January next July when you're sweating and complaining about the heat. And don't even tell me you'll be happy when it's 90 degrees. You know you'll be whining like everyone else.

You can wear all those beautiful sweaters you bought for 75% off after Christmas.

Ditto for the slipper socks.

The heavy coats hide the evidence of all the Christmas cookies you ate.

You can play "See How High Your Spouse Can Jump" when you touch him/her with your frozen toes. You get extra points if they jump all the way out of bed. Add more points if it's accompanied by a screech.

January White Sales. You can buy that tropical looking bedspread you've had your eye on. Add mosquito netting and some Caribbean music and you can pretend you're in Jamaica.

Snow shoveling is good exercise. So they say.

You burn more calories when you shiver.

Spring begins in March, which comes after February, which comes after January.

And last but not least, you can't go anywhere so you get more writing done. After you check all your favorite blogs and play solitaire until you finally win a game, that is.

Okay, everyone. Give us some more reasons to appreciate this frigid, gloomy month!

MY UNREMEMBERED JOB

by Gina Sestak

As most of you regular readers know, I've been writing about the many jobs I've held every two weeks for more than a year now. So far, I've covered about half of them. There is one job, though, that I remember almost nothing about.

It was a work study job for a department or group at the University of Pittsburgh. I remember that much. And I held it for at least one semester while I was an undergraduate. There were other people working there. Phil and Bruce and Karen and Jim; a few more whose names I can't recall. I even remained friendly with Bruce afterwards, talking with him on and off for years. I just can't remember what I did or where the work took place. I know that it was meant to have something to do with keypunching or typing. Unfortunately, I was able to do neither -- I'd broken a finger in karate class and had one hand in a cast. [Never do a sloppy down block on a front kick!] It may have involved some type of geographic mapping. I'm not sure.

You're probably all thinking that I must have really enjoyed the sixties. Well, maybe I did, but that isn't why I remember so little. It was the seventies when I held this job. The problem, I think, was the utter chaos in my life at the time.

I've mentioned my ex-husband a few times in prior blogs. We fell in love in 1970 and planned to marry that August. Then we got cold feet and moved in together. Then we broke up.

Breaking up is hard to do. Doo wah, doo wah.

But it was an amazing time in many ways. Emotional turmoil has a way of shifting one into an altered state of consciousness. In mid-winter, I'd sometimes find myself halfway to school without a coat, and realize that I didn't even feel the cold. Of course, I blamed the heartbreak for this new-found talent, but I explored the sensations from the inside and used the understanding I found as a base to develop the ability to control my reaction to cold. It's actually quite easy. You just relax into the cold, and let it dissipate around you. The same technique works well for getting rid of headaches. You lean into the pain until you realize that it's nothing but a group of separate things, like trees within a forest, and you relax into the painless space between.

I was attending school full-time and working to support myself and pay tuition. I found a sleeping room in an off-campus boarding house run by an old woman who refused to accept the fact that I really didn't want to eat with her and her family and the other (all male) boarders. It was cheaper if I scrounged for my own food. Then she kicked me out on one day's notice, claiming I had tracked mud into her house. I'm not certain if I did or not.

I was homeless for awhile. She didn't give me back my security deposit right away, and I had no money with which to find another place. I took to sleeping in University buildings or on friends' couches and floors. When I finally got the check for my refund, the bank it was written on refused to cash it because I didn't have an account there, even though I had good identification and it was clearly a business check. Having not eaten in three days or so, I lost it, cursing the bank employee and fighting off the temptation to whack him over the head with the triangular name plate on his desk until a bank guard threw me out. I still refuse to do business with Mellon. I used to hope I'd hit the lottery, just so I could deposit all my millions somewhere else.

I was able to cash the check eventually. I got other jobs, finished school, reconciled with Terry, married him, and then divorced. But I remember how to keep from feeling cold. And I can often enter altered states of consciousness at will.

You're probably wondering why I thought to write about this job today. The temperature in Pittsburgh hit the upper 80s, so I didn't need to use my skill with cold. I was reminded of it by the thought of keypunching, and how far computer use has come in the last few decades. This week and next, I'm participating in an on-line conference sponsored by the International Association for the Study of Dreams [http://www.asdreams.org], a psiber dream conference! [The spelling "psi" is on purpose.] More than a hundred people from all over the world are sharing discussions and dreams, something no one thought possible back when I held my unremembered job.